Posted: 12 Jun 2012 10:53 PM PDT
In the last quarter of the twentieth century there used to be a Mumbai-based newspaper with the title Afternoon Carrier & Despatch.
This paper used to publish interviews with politicians and publish these under the caption “Twenty Questions”.
In
1991, when I was approached for this 20-question interview, its very
first question was: “Mr. Advani, what would you identify as your
greatest weakness?
My answer was: “Books!”. I added “At a grosser level, chocolates.”
Since
then, on all special occasions like anniversaries, poll successes etc.,
visitors coming to greet me would generally keep adding books to my
personal library, or sometimes fetch me a packet or box of chocolates!
Quite
a few books have been presented to me by Father Bento Rodrigues of
Father Agnel’s High School, Delhi. In my memoirs titled “My Country, My
Life” I have recorded that after the Hawala allegation levelled against
me during the Narasimha Rao regime, I not only resigned forthwith from
the Lok Sabha, but simultaneously declared that I shall not go back to
Parliament until absolved by an appropriate court of law.
The
hawala charge was levelled against me in early 1996. So, when Lok Sabha
polls were held later that year, I did not contest. Meanwhile, I
challenged the chargesheet filed against me.
This
case went on for sixteen months in the Delhi High Court. In April 1977,
Justice Mohemmed Shamim of the Delhi High Court delivered the verdict,
quashing the charge of corruption against me.
Fortunately for me the 11th
Lok Sabha formed in 1996 did not last its full term. It was dissolved
within two years. So, when elections took place again in 1998, I
contested, and won. It was in 1970, that I had first been elected to
Parliament. Since then, it is only these two years (1996-1998) that I have not been in Parliament. It was some time during this period that Father Rodrigues gave me an inspiring book, Tough Times Do Not Last! Tough Men Do.
Some months back, he gave me another interesting book captioned “THE SHIFT”. The book is written by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer. The sub-title of the book is “Taking Your Life from Ambition to Meaning”.
The sub-title immediately rang a bell. It reminded me of one of the
closing chapters of my own autobiography, “The Pursuit of Meaning and
Happiness in Life”. Some reviewers of my book of memoirs have described
it as the best chapter of the book.
This
chapter opens with a reference to a widely acclaimed thriller I had
read. This book written by Jed Rubenfeld, a law professor at Yale
University is titled “The Interpretation of Murder”. However, I found the book less about a murder mystery, and more about the mystery of life.
There is no mystery to happiness, affirms the author.
“Unhappy
men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied,
some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn – or
worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they do to it, and so they
live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look
back. He doesn’t look ahead. He lives in the present.
“But there’s the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning.
The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a
man need only live in the present: he need only live for the moment.
But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his
life - a man must reinhabit the past, however dark, and live for the
future, however uncertain. Thus, nature dangles happiness and meaning
before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.”
For myself, I have chosen meaning – that’s what I have said in my book.
Meaning, I wrote, comes with purpose, with a sense of mission, whatever be one’s calling in life.
In my autobiography published in 2008 I have recorded:
“When
I look back at my life of eight decades, I remind myself that I found
my calling in life when on a tennis court in Hyderabad (Sindh) I first
heard the name of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and became its
swayamsewak. I found meaning when I started attending
Sunday evening discourses on the Bhagwad Gita by Swami Ranganathananda
at the Ramakrishna Mission, Karachi. I found meaning when I left my home
and family to work as a pracharak of the RSS, first in
Karachi, and later, after being uprooted by Partition, in Rajasthan.
That meaning got further enriched when I embarked on a political journey
fifty-five years ago, first as a worker of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and
later of the Bharatiya Janata Party. It is a journey that has not
yet ended. From the age of fourteen and a half years till now, only one
duty has defined the purpose of my life: to serve my Motherland.
“During
the course of fulfilling this duty, my devotion, sincerity and
commitment to my own cause and ideals have been tested many times,
especially when I have faced any adversity in my life. I can say, with
both humility and contentment, that I have not been found wanting in the
eyes of my own conscience. Errors of judgement, I have committed many. I
have also erred in the execution of my tasks. But I have never indulged
in scheming or acts of opportunism for self-promotion nor have I
compromised on my core principles for personal comfort or gains. I have
stood my ground for the sake of self-respect and for what I believed was
in the larger interest of the nation, even when doing so carried
obvious risks. Whether I had to spend long stints in prison, as happened
during the Emergency, or had to face a false charge of corruption in
the Hawala movement, or when I was misunderstood and castigated for
having betrayed my ideology after my visit to Pakistan, I have followed
the call of my conscience and stood firm. Besides fortifying my
self-belief, it has given me happiness and imparted meaning to my life.”
The novel that had provoked the above thoughts in me claimed that a man can either have meaning or happiness in life.
I have had the good fortune of experiencing both, and in abundance.
L.K. Advani
New Delhi